I happened to look at the new beta.python.org today -
'what an improvement!' I thought - impressed with the new
look and feel of the site. I was all fired up and ready to
contribute - to start moving and creating content. Watch out
pydotorg, here I come...

Until I realized I couldn't !

I don't know YAML. I found no samples. The Redesign
Site is full of teasers about how much good stuff
is in svn.python.org, and how you can build it with Pyramid.
Except for one small thing - you don't have access to
the content source. That's right - there are a bunch of
things to be done but no direction on how to go about doing
it! This left me even more exasperated than last week - when
I tried to install Pyramid, found that I needed 5 different
things (2 of which I never heard of and needed to be
compiled) - finally giving up after realizing I'm not
comfortable installing Python 2.4 on my Mac OSX just for this.

So this drove me to effbot's
efforts. A standard wiki for editing, combined with a
front end rendering system - how nice - I can sure write
wiki markup! Until I realized there no wiki yet. It's
hidden, maybe because the 'HT2HTML-to-MoinMoin
converter is about 80% ready'? Aha! at least I can
contribute to that code - oh wait, that's hidden too.

I was creating a bulleted list in Word and using indentation to demarcate a sub-list, when a thought crossed my mind - what would it be like to use delimiter, instead of indentation?

Fruits {

Apple

Orange }

Veggies {

Spinach }

Eek! And yet, while writing programs, we work harder to appease the machine, than to help the human readers. Perhaps we have been working with machines so much, we have lost our ability to recognize human-friendliness?

Because it offers more proof that dynamically typed, loosely coupled languages can more productive in creating robust solutions than statically typed, stricter languages with deeply nested class hierarchies. Java and C# essentially lead us through the same path for tackling problems. One may be a better version of the other (I like C# more) but the methodology is very similar. In fact the release of C# only validated the Java-style methodology by emulating it (albeit offering a more productive way to follow it).

Enter Python or Ruby, both different from the Java/C# style. Both producing 'enlightening' expreriences in ever growing list of seasoned, fairly well known static-style developers (Bruce Eckel, Bruce Tate, Martin Fowler...). As the knowledge spreads, it pokes holes in the strong Java/C# meme in peoples minds. Then people start to explore and experiment, and discover the Python (or Ruby) productivity gain. Some may prefer one, some the other. Ruby, in the end, validates the fact that Java/C# style methods may not be the best for everything, something the Python advocates have been saying for quite some time.